Young man working in front of computer with healthcare videoblog on the screen.
Does your website need doctoring? Is it experiencing symptoms of low traffic and high bounce rate?
Patients aren’t the only ones that need your care to stay healthy. Sometimes, your website needs a checkup, too.
If you need your healthcare website to get well soon, you’ve come to the right place. Use the website improvement tips below to get your website back on its feet.
If you don’t already have a blog, start one now and never stop pumping out content. Aim for at least two articles per week.
This won’t help you right away, but it’s essential for later that you make it a habit now. That’s why it’s first on the list.
All the other SEO tips on this list will help people find your content in search engines. When people search for topics related to healthcare, your content will show up in the results. But you’ll need to have content first in order for them to find it.
Furthermore, the more high-quality content you update your site with, the more authoritative you appear. And authority is very important for your search ranking.
In SEO, Site Authority (SA) and Page Authority (PA) are basically a score of how optimized your site is. Learn more here about how authority affects your search rank.
Now, let’s see what it takes to add quality, value, and authority to your blog posts.
Start with keywords. Keywords are the words or phrases people type into the search box when searching online.
Base your topics on the popular healthcare keywords people are already searching for. Use this keyword in the title (which should also be the URL) and a few (not too many) times in the post. You can research the popularity of keywords with free tools like Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
Next, let’s talk page structure.
Break each article up into smaller, titled sections. And break each section into small paragraphs of around 1-3 sentences each. Use images about every 300 words, according to the instructions in the section further down.
Use this article as an example.
Backlinks, hyperlinks on other sites that lead back to yours, also boost your search rank. There are two basic ways to earn this.
When you produce enough high-quality, valuable content, other blogs will naturally use you as a source in their posts. Otherwise, you can write guest posts for other sites and include the backlink yourself.
But be careful when you guest post to use the backlink naturally, as with any other source link. If the link isn’t helpful or relevant and it’s obviously only there to promote your site, it will actually penalize your ranking.
If your website offers the same, generic content as everyone else, why would anyone care to be there? The truth is, they won’t. Even worse, if site visitors see boring, irrelevant, or low-quality images, they’ll leave before they even get to the content.
Unfortunately, people do judge books by their covers. Like it or not, your images tell them what to expect from your content. And if your “blah” images leave them unimpressed, they won’t even start reading.
So try to avoid generic looking images, like stock images. If possible, use original photos or artwork.
If no one on your staff possesses these creative talents, hire someone to create a stock of images for you. It’s not that expensive to hire a photographer or artist to build you a personal library of images for your site.
Responsiveness means “optimized for viewing on multiple devices.” That is, the site detects the type of device viewing it and displays the most appropriate version for the visitor, as it should be.
Mobile users should have a simpler version that fits their screen and doesn’t take to long to load. Desktop users should see the full version in all its glory — with all the bells, whistles, and autoplay videos they’ve come to expect.
It’s downright shocking if you’re not already doing this. By now, responsiveness has been a web design staple that all of your competitors have been using for several years. An unresponsive website is not only behind the times, but it also kills your search rank.
Be careful that you don’t take the above instructions the wrong way. Your full site should be something special to behold. But don’t cram it so full of bells and whistles (and huge files) that it takes forever to load.
Short load time is not just for mobile sites, but the full site as well. Your search rank is directly impacted by load time. While rich media like videos are good for your search rank, long loading times bring it down.
Find a good balance between rich content and acceptable load time.
Now let’s see what happens when you start getting traffic to your site. Imagine a visitor clicks on your newest blog post and they like what they read.
They want to learn more about the topic, but can’t find the rest of your posts. They want to find out about your services, but they can’t find that either. They look for a way to leave feedback, but they can’t even find your contact information.
It’s all probably there on the website, somewhere. But when visitors can’t find what they’re looking for, they leave, and your blog posts accomplish nothing.
Don’t let this happen to you. Organize the sections of your site under clearly-labeled menu headers.
Use an intuitive menu system. Most sites use a top-of-page menu bar and/or drop-down sidebar menu under a menu icon. It’s also good to list the sections of your website in a mini sitemap in the footer.
A landing page is basically a homepage for a specific category of content on your site. Google loves landing pages. So make as many landing pages for your content as you can.
Every multi-page section on your site menu should have its own landing page. Also, make landing pages for your most commonly posted blog topics.
This is easy if you organize your blog posts with topic tags. For every tag, you should make a landing page. For example, you can have a landing page for addiction recovery posts and another for posts about physical therapy.
Make your landing pages like you did your homepage. They should have an overview, an attention-grabbing design, possibly an intro video, and interactive/animated elements. And, of course, they need easy-to-follow links to the content.
If you have a lot of old content that looks nothing like we just described, you’ve got some overhauling to do.
Start by replacing old, ugly, generic images. Restructure your articles to the standard above and speed up slow-loading pages.
Also, check for broken links (hyperlinks to pages that no longer exist). These are bad for your search rank.
While you’re at it, check through your old content for dated information. if you find any, here are two good ways to address it.
First, you can make simple changes to the old article to update it. Then, promote the updated post on social media the same way you would with a new post. This is way easier than writing a new post but gets you just as much traffic.
Or, if you’ve already posted an article that gives updated information on the topic, put a link to it in the old article. This will boost the popularity of the new post and the old one. If you don’t have a post that updates the old, you can create one.
Improving your website helps you help your patients. Use these website improvement tips to get patients the care they need.
Want to learn more? Check out How to Create a Successful Small Business Website.